Grim recruiting

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now the longest waged by an all-volunteer force in U.S. history.

Not only do soldiers rotate back and forth into the battlefield for multiple and extended times away from their families and friends to fight for their country, another vital responsibility the U.S. Army requires of them is to constantly supply new recruits.

Unfortunately, as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan become the outcomes of empty promises and thousands of deaths, there is little patriotism left for the country that soldiers had before, which led them to sign up for the Army after 9/11.

As less people have the desire to sign up for the Army, working every day from 6:30 a.m. to 10 p.m. trying to persuade the youth to wear Army green has also been growing tremendously hard for the recruiters. According to Time Magazine in its April 13 issue, the outcome of this has left the recruiters “with perhaps the toughest, if not the most dangerous, job in the Army.”

The consequence of the fact that no one wants to join the Army anymore has not been easy to bear. “Last year alone, the number of recruiters who killed themselves was triple the overall Army rate. Like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injury, recruiter suicides are a hidden cost of the nation’s wars,” explains the article.

The outcome of the rise in suicides has not only been tragic but has also caused the Army to do nothing other than lie to their bosses in order to recruit a certain number of people into the Army.

“Because station commanders and their bosses are rated on how well their subordinates recruit, there is a strong incentive to cut corners to bring in enlistees. I’ve seen [recruiters] make kids drink gallons of water trying to flush marijuana out of their system before they take their physicals,” one Houston recruiter says privately in the article. 

“I’ve seen them forge signatures. Sign up a pair of enlistees in a month and a recruiter is hailed; sign up none and he can be ordered to monthly Saturday sessions, where he is verbally pounded for his failure.”

It is tragic that it took so many suicides to bring this to the attention of the American public. The New York Times reported last November that “seventeen Army recruiters nationwide have committed suicide since 2001 and four were from the East Texas unit.

There are 38 recruiting battalions nationwide, with 8,400 soldiers. The Army’s suicide rate has been climbing as the war in Iraq has increased deployments.”

Such a preventable problem should not be hidden from the public. There should be an investigation and serious problems in the recruitment of new soldiers should not be covered up, because if it is, the United States not only has to witness deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also witness them in its own Army units within its own borders.